Wheat growing takes root in Taiwan

A group of elementary school children showing off a miniature wheat field they planted in their own school is not something one sees in Taipei City every day.

But that is exactly what occurred April 3 on the eve of Children’s Day, as 11 second-grade students from Zhinan Elementary School organized an elaborate tour with singing and dancing performances. Wearing caps made from wheat stalks, the enthusiastic pupils wanted to show the world what they had accomplished at the end of their five-month wheat-growing project.

The project, which students from more than 40 elementary and secondary schools from across Taiwan are taking part in, is part of an initiative organized by Adam Shih, founder of Rejoice Bread Workshop. The goals are to teach the younger generation about the importance of consuming locally produced food, and to help them develop a feeling of closeness to the land they live on.

Joined by the National Federation of Teachers Unions and Homemakers’ Union Consumers Cooperative, Shih launched the project last winter. A little more than six months later, the seeds he planted have begun to take root in the hearts of the children.

With broad smiles on their faces, the 8-year-olds at Zhinan Elementary jostled to tell members of the media and other guests about what they have learned from growing wheat.

Later during a group presentation, they took turns going on stage and explaining to the audience the esoteric phases of wheat growth—from germination, seedling, and tillering, on to jointing, booting, heading, all the way to flowering and ripening.

“Tillers, which develop through a process similar to splitting, are secondary shoots that grow from nodal buds on the older wheat shoots,” said Huang Da-yen, one of the students, in a supremely confident tone.

Zhou Zi-ling, 9, described herself and her fellow students as “matchmakers” during the pollination process, since rather than allowing the plants to self-pollinate, as is usual, the students used paint brushes to cause them to cross-pollinate. “We then played the role of gynecologists because we had to check and measure the size of the plant to see if we succeeded.”

Zhinan Elementary School students display some of their artwork made from wheat stalks.

Teacher Huang Shu-ting recalled that when she received a box full of teaching materials from the project organizers last October, her first thought was: “What a mission impossible! How can a dryland crop like wheat be grown in Taipei, which rains all the time in winter?”

But after looking into the materials and doing some online research, Huang changed her mind and decided to follow through with the project as part of a general activity class.

According to Huang, she and the students struggled in the beginning to find the right place, soil and irrigation method for growing wheat, but things got better as time went on, after they gradually understood the details of the project better.

The students, who kept detailed diaries of their wheat-growing activities, enjoyed every bit of it even though it was hard work, from plowing the clotted dirt to rescuing the seedlings from the pouring rain by building a protective roof, Huang said.

“During the process, I saw my students develop the capacity of independent thinking. They learned how to work with one another, and to solve one problem after another,” Huang said. “They laughed; they sweated; they learned to be patient for the sake of something wonderful to come.”

Part of the project included a field trip that saw the students and their parents visit a major flour plant and a group of farmers who work with Shih to revive wheat growing in Taiwan.

Chang Da-yen’s mother said that not only was she surprised to find that Taiwan can grow wheat; she was also amazed at the quality of flours made from Taiwanese wheat.

“This is a meaningful project, as it teaches children to cherish the food we eat and to learn something about our native soil,” she said.

A group of local farmers is growing wheat to reduce Taiwan’s overreliance on imported grains.

Indeed, the project is intended to make the public more aware of Taiwan’s food options. While just about everyone knows that Taiwan is a major consumer and exporter of rice, few people realize that just a few decades ago the rainy country was once also a producer of dryland crops such as wheat.

In light of global food shortages after World War II, the ROC government encouraged farmers to cultivate a variety of grains, wheat in particular. The country’s wheat fields grew fast to 25,000 hectares in the early 1960s, but then the frenzy died down quickly. After Taiwan opened its doors to American wheat imports in 1967, local farmers soon lost most of their business, unable to compete with the cheaper American crops. As a result, wheat growing became almost nonexistent on the island.

Things began to change three years ago, when a group of rice farmers from Miaoli County decided to restart growing wheat between the two rice cropping seasons—an initiative that many perceived as bold and idealistic.

“It is a common misunderstanding that the climate in Taiwan is too wet for growing wheat, but I remember seeing wheat fields all around some 40 years ago when I was just a child, and even now I retain a vivid image of those golden fields,” farmer Wu Shui-chi told Taiwan Today April 2.

“The significance of our movement to grow wheat again is that we must do something about the overreliance of imported crops now, before it is too late,” he added.

Wu was referring to the fact that Taiwan has a stunningly low rate of food self-sufficiency—32 percent in 2010, based on calorie intake from domestic production.

Every year, Taiwan consumes 1.6 million tons of rice, and 1.2 million tons of wheat. It produces around 90 percent of the rice it uses, but has to rely entirely on imports for wheat.

“We would have a real crisis on our hands if imported crop prices started skyrocketing, like they did for a while in 2008, when the cost of a 22-kilogram sack of wheat suddenly shot up to NT$800 (US$27), which was almost twice as much as the NT$440 it cost in 2007,” said Chen Wen-long, 64. “We should prepare for a rainy day in case other countries stop selling us their grains.”

Zheng Feng-zi (from left), Wu Wen-xiong, Chen Wen-long and Wu Shui-chi, along with other members of the marketing class, gather in their bimestrial meeting April 2 to discuss adding black beans to their rotation crops.

Out of pure passion and a desire to do the right thing, a group of famers joined together in 2008 and began experimenting with growing wheat on the alluvial plains of Miaoli’s Yuanli Township. Among them were Wu and Chen, as well as Li Xin-wu, Wu Wen-xiong, Zheng Feng-zi and several others.

In the first year of the project, everything that could go wrong, did, for the farmers could not even find any seeds to sow.

According to Li, they needed at least 150 kilograms of seeds for every hectare, but the only place they found with enough seeds was a 70-hectare wheat field located in Taichung County. The owners of that land, however, were under contract to sell their entire harvest to Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor Inc., which uses the wheat to grow yeast for making its famous sorghum liquor.

Eventually the farmers managed to acquire a shipment of imported wheat from a flour factory in Taichung’s Dajia Township and were able to begin their experiment at last.

In November 2008, after harvesting that year’s second crop of rice, the group sowed the wheat seeds using two different methods—plowing the seeds directly into the soil, and straw mulching, which is the application of straw left on the rice paddy as a protective cover over wheat-seeded areas to reduce erosion and help growth.

The result of their first tryout was rather disappointing, as only Chen, who used the straw-mulching method, managed to get a small yield.

Just when they were struggling to find the best way to grow wheat, Wu Shui-chi saw a television documentary about Shih and his initiative to promote local wheat production through contract farming.

These like-minded souls soon joined forces and the next year Wu, along with the others, began growing Shih’s nongenetically modified Taichung No. 2 wheat. Their first harvest came in March 2010, despite the warm and humid weather that year and damage to the crops caused by birds.

In June 2011, the group officially formed the first wheat marketing class under the Yuanli Farmers’ Association, with more than 10 members.

Zheng Feng-zi stands April 3 in his wheat field in Yuanli Township. The crop would be ready for harvest in another two weeks or so, Zheng said.

Li said that even though they sell their crops to Shih at a charge of NT$30 (US$1) per kilogram, twice as much as imported wheat, the wheat farmers still have to rely on other sources of income to keep their dreams alive because of their relatively small production.

He urged the government to play a bigger role in their initiative by increasing the incentives for crop rotation, expanding the types of crops farmers can grow, and encouraging consumers to buy local foods instead of imported grains.

“We hope more and more people will identify with the idea of ‘grow locally, shop locally,’ as it is key to increasing Taiwan’s food self-sufficiency,” Li said.

In the same vein, Chen expressed the hope that the people of Taiwan can buy domestically grown flour-based products, because it is environmentally friendly in terms of food mileage—the distance food is transported from the time of its production until it reaches the consumer.

“Our wheat is grown the most natural way, as we do not hunt birds or use pesticides to protect our crops, and we use only homemade organic fertilizers,” Chen said. “As a result, our crops are healthier and fresher than imported wheat, which often comes with chemical residues.”

These hardworking farmers can rest assured, at least to some extent, that their efforts will not be in vain, since the students from the more than 40 schools taking part in Shih’s wheat growing project have started developing the kind of consumer consciousness that will enable them to choose products made with locally produced flour over imported ones.

“Considering that we started out as a tiny minority, the support and response we have received thus far is very good,” said Shih, who forecast their yields of wheat from winter 2011 to be around 120 metric tons, about 0.01 percent of the total imported volume of 10,000 metric tons.

“We will start growing soybeans next year and hope that this social movement can grow in scale to benefit more and more people in Taiwan,” he said. (HZW)